One major challenge facing Canadian industry is the recruitment, training and retention of the skilled workers needed to staff the multitude of projects now and into the future. Apprenticeship works, but the process can be haphazard and unwieldy, and too often the journeyperson/mentor charged with transferring skills to the next generation of workers isn’t properly supported with a proper training methodology and follow-up. Add to this an aging trades workforce and the need for a massive influx of new apprentices over the next few years, and we’re faced with the potential of a significant skills gap.

In 1940, industry was faced with a crisis too. Thousands of workers left their jobs to join the military, at a time when skilled workers were needed to produce the products and services that were needed to fight the War. There was a need to rapidly train a non-traditional workforce to maintain or even increase productivity without sacrificing safety (hurt workers aren’t very productive) or quality (an airplane, shell, bomb, tank or gun sight needs to work right the first time and every time). Thus was born the Training Within Industry initiative, or TWI.

TWI was a concerted effort to teach industry how to rapidly develop their workforce and how to leverage their workforce for gains in productivity. It was implemented in many different industries – manufacturing, forestry, agriculture, construction, logistics and others – in total over 11,000 instances. Hundreds of thousands of people were trained using the principles developed by TWI, often much faster than they could have been trained under traditional practices.

The comparisons between then and now are striking:

1940

Now

Lack of skilled workers due to enlistment and increased production requirements

Lack of skilled workers due to demographics and increased production requirements

Pool of unemployed (25% in the US circa 1939)

Pool of unemployed (in excess of 50% in some Northern communities)

Lack of required technical skills

Lack of required technical skills

Lack of education/literacy a factor

Lack of education/literacy a factor

Need to rapidly train for quality production

Need to rapidly train for quality production

Need to rapidly train for safe production

Need to rapidly train for safe production

Need to train a diverse, non-traditional workforce

Need to train a diverse, non-traditional workforce

No compromise on safety, quality, productivity allowed

No compromise on safety, quality, productivity allowed

National emergency

Looming skills crisis

TWI is a time-proven, reliable way to ensure that employees are taught the right skills, the right way, from experienced workers, on the job. It is a simple, direct and practical method that allows people to rapidly become skilled. It plants the seeds for lifelong learning and improvement so vital to remaining competitive. It can reduce training time, improve skills, enhance teamwork and lead to an increase in the ROI on apprenticeship.Oddly enough, TWI didn’t disappear – it moved off-shore, where the rebuilding efforts of the post-war Marshall Plan emphasized these processes in war-ravaged countries in Europe and the Far East. In particular, the Japanese adopted these principles, which evolved into the Toyota Production System, lean manufacturing and continuous improvement cultures – things we’re re-learning in North America today.